Dirk de Vrije (1620, Gouda – 1681, Gouda), was a Dutch Golden Age glass painter.

Biography

According to the RKD he was probably related to the glass painter Adriaan Gerritsz de Vrije, who was active in the

Janskerk (Gouda) The Sint Janskerk in Gouda, the Netherlands, is a large Gothic church, known especially for its stained glass windows, for which it has been placed on the list of the top 100 Dutch monuments. History The church is dedicated to John the Baptist, ...

.Dirk de Vrije
in the

RKD The Netherlands Institute for Art History or RKD (Dutch: RKD-Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis), previously Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), is located in The Hague and is home to the largest art history center i ...

According to

van der Aa Abraham Jacob van der Aa (7 December 1792, Amsterdam – 21 March 1857, Gorinchem) was a Dutch writer best known for his dictionaries, one of notable people and the other of notable places in the Netherlands. He was born in Amsterdam in 1792. ...

he was a pupil of

Wouter Crabeth II Wouter Pietersz. Crabeth II (1594 – c. 18 June 1644) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. Biography Wouter Crabeth was born in Gouda in 1594, the son of the writer and politician Pieter Woutersz. Crabeth. He was named after his grandfather Wouter ...

, and another master in Utrecht. He travelled several times to France, until he became a member of the Gouda ''vroedschap'' or city council. He was mentioned as one of the 16th-century artists of the stained glass window ''cartoons'' in an exhibition of the Janskerk in Gouda in 1938, but his name was probably confused with Dirk Jansz Verheije (d. 1603) of Delft, a painter from Delft who made the window-gift from Delft for the Janskerk in the 16th century.Zsuzsanna van Ruyven-Zeman, Xander van Eck and Henny van Dolder-de Wit, Het geheim van Gouda: de cartons van de Goudse glazen, Zutphen (Walburg Pers) 2002, If he was active for the Janskerk, he may perhaps have been the assistant of Adriaan de Vrije, since he was mentioned along with him in Ignatius Walvis' ''Description of Gouda'' in 1714.''Beschryving der stad Gouda''
by Ignatius Walvis, in

Google books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical ...

, 1714, p 103 He is listed as mayor (''burgermeester'') of Gouda and city mason (''fabrykmeester'') in 1674–1681. According to Houbraken (who was quoting Walvis), he was a respected painter of Gouda and contemporary of Adriaen van der Spelt.Dirk de Vrije Biography
in ''De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen'' (1718) by Arnold Houbraken, courtesy of the

Digital library for Dutch literature The Digital Library for Dutch Literature (Dutch: Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren or DBNL) is a website (showing the abbreviation as dbnl) about Dutch language and Dutch literature. It contains thousands of literary texts, second ...

He died while mayor of Gouda.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vrije, Dirk de 1620 births 1681 deaths Dutch Golden Age painters Dutch male painters People from Gouda, South Holland Dutch stained glass artists and manufacturers